WASHINGTON _ The Justice Department blamed a delay in releasing financial disclosure forms for Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on a bureaucratic snafu in a letter to Congress Wednesday.
Whitaker had faced criticism for the hold-up in making his financial disclosure public after he was chosen by President Donald Trump last month to replace Jeff Sessions as the nation's top law enforcement official.
But Lee Lofthus, the department's top ethics official, said in the letter that the delay was due to an administrative error within the Justice Department's ethics office.
"While review work was begun on Mr. Whitaker's submissions, due to administrative error in our Ethics Office, the review of his reports was not finalized and his reports were not certified in a timely manner," according to the letter obtained by Bloomberg News.
The filings released last month showed that Whitaker was paid more than $900,000 by a conservative nonprofit in the months before joining the Justice Department in 2017.
